You thought Lubbock, Texas was only famous as the birthplace of Buddy Holly? Think again. It’s a veritable hothouse of cotton genetic resources conservation and use. Not much of what you might call news in the Eurekalert piece, but interesting nonetheless. For example, did you know that there are three international cotton germplasm collections, in Lubbock, France and Uzbekistan? Or that breeders are scouring wild cottons for the genes to make the crop more environmentally friendly?
Wikiseedia: what is it?
There’s a long and detailed message from the folks at WorldChanging about something they call SeedPOD. It isn’t clear exactly what this resource will be. A sort of information exchange, but also a network for exchanging seeds and maybe too a platform for sharing experiments and results in more sustainable agriculture. As they describe it:
an imagined toolkit to keep seeds moving, farmers thriving and communities fed in the face of massive environmental change. Perhaps it will trigger some interesting thinking out there: at very least, we hope you find it briefly diverting.
All this seems to be organized through something called the Wikiseedia, but as far as I can see there is no link to this fabulous beast. Go to www.wikiseedia.com, however, and you see a bare bones installation of a wiki (a special kind of web site that anyone can contribute to and edit) that contains no content (yet?) and that has not been changed since 5 March 2007. WorldChanging’s post is dated 27 April.
There’s something happening out there. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But it will bear watching. At least, I hope it will, because it sounds really exciting.
Billionth seed banked
The Guardian reports that the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recently deposited the billionth seed in its genebank. Note, that’s not a billion species, or even a million, but the billionth seed 1. Normally such blatant manipulation would be beneath our exalted notice, but Kew wisely chose a useful plant on which to bestow this singular honour.
- In parts of Tanzania women depend on this species for local beer production as a major source of income.
- It is used to make various types of local baskets for transporting produce, such as tomatoes in Iringa.
- It is in high demand as a building material. It is used for scaffolding, furniture, general house construction, and fencing. Fences are susceptible to damage by termites and borers. The small stems are used for pipes and arrow shafts
All from FAO, which does not seem to think it is all that endangered. Still, Kew thinks it is worth banking, and that’s good enough for us.
Sustainable cacao conservation
Here’s a (relatively) new approach to sustainable genebank conservation, from Chocolate in Context: sponsor an accession. The International Cocoa Genebank in Trinidad will accept donations from US$20, which saves one tree for one year, to US$500, which saves a whole plot (no idea how many trees that is) for 10 years. And another web site, called Yachana Gourmet, preserves a tree on a farm, not in a genebank, and gives you access to tasty chocolate and other goodies.
Cereals databases
Before I disappear for a few days of immersion in the First International Breadfruit Symposium back in Fiji, let me point to two somewhat complementary online resources on cereals genetic resources that I have come across – no doubt Jeremy will say and about time too – in the past couple of days.
The FIGS database brings together passport and evaluation data on bread wheat landraces from a number of the major genebanks and “allows the user to efficiently interrogate the data associated with this collection and provides the capacity to identify custom subsets of accessions with single and multiple trait(s) that may be of importance to breeding programs.” FIGS stands for “Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy,” and the focus is on identifying material with resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses.
The other database is that of Israel’s Institute of Cereal Crop Improvement, which includes information on accessions of wild cereal relatives collected over the past 30 years. Again, there’s a particular focus on data on disease resistance.